There have been a ton of reports of flying saucers over Houston, which in and of itself is no news. The news is that many of the reports are accurate. Houston-based NASA has built a supersonic flying saucer known as a Low Density Supersonic Decelerator, part of an effort to get larger payloads—as heavy as 100 tons—to Mars in support of human missions.

The Low Density Supersonic Decelerator first flew on June 28 at the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility in Kauai, Hawaii.

A high altitude balloon raised it, releasing it at 120,000 feet.

At that point the saucer fired its own rocket traveling it higher still, at about Mach 3.8.